Music can include many different audio characteristics such as beats, downbeats, chords, melodies and timbre. There can be a number of practical applications for which it is desirable to identify at least some of the above audio characteristics from a musical signal. Such applications can include music recommendation and electronic music distribution (EMD) applications in which music similar to a reference track is searched from a music catalogue or music database. These applications typically use music similarity measures to characterize the music track, which facilitates the searching of large music catalogues for potentially similar music.
In particular the character of music may be expressed in terms of the timbre of the music signal. Features describing the timbre or other characteristics of the music signal may be used to form a pairwise comparison between each music track within the music catalogue and the reference music track. However for large music catalogues this process can be computationally demanding for the host computational device which can result in unacceptable delay when processing a request for a set of musically similar audio tracks or songs.
The use of efficient content management techniques can enable large music catalogues of the order of tens of millions of tracks to be searched efficiently and effectively for musically similar audio tracks or songs.